Plant and flower gardening has been around since the beginning of civilization and with it comes the continuous need for fertilizer, weed and pest prevention, and water, lots and lots of water. Water has always been a precious, and, an invaluable resource, and in today's world it is even more so, and the need for conserving it is at an all-time high.
Nearly every home, in nearly every place, has an area where they will have plants and flowers growing, or someone attempting to do so. According to the article, ‘Blades of glory: America's love affair with lawns,’ in the Jun. 24, 2011 edition of the magazine, The Week, about 80 percent of American homes have yards—and based on the 2011 American Housing Survey of the United States, there are approximately 100 million houses in America. This means there are approximately 80 million American yards, or variants of yards, that can be landscaped, and landscapes need watering.
The scope of this embodiment does not deal with watering lawns; its focus is primarily with the many flowering annuals, perennials, bulbs, small to larger shrubs, and all the varying things gardeners like to plant in the soil of all these yards aside from their lawns. This equates to lots of watering, fertilizing, herbicides, and the applying of pesticides; and herein lies the problem: lots of water, contaminated with fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides can end up flowing away from the target plant and flowers towards areas for which they were not intended.
Every day there is someone, somewhere, watering a plant in their garden; and along with them are the gardening enthusiasts, who out of love for their little botanical friends, are diligently applying fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. One outcome that these well-meaning groups have in common is this: more-often-than-not they watch helplessly as much of the needed water, and gardening additives, flow to surrounding areas and away from the plant for which they were intended; and in today's world water has become a commodity, and its conservation is a responsibility in which each person should participate.
There have been attempts at correcting this seemingly universal problem for gardeners for many years and a prevalent solution was to build up a bowl shaped mound of soil around the base of the plant, commonly referred to as a soil watering-well. It was intended to contain the water long enough for it to percolate down to the plant's roots. A few of the other solutions are the use of mulches piled around the plant in the hopes of retaining moisture; or stones sunk into the soil around the plant as a border, or to simply place the plant several inches below ground level.
Unfortunately, the aforementioned so-called solutions, along with many others, generally fail soon after their implementation. A soil watering-well tends to absorb water laterally as well as gravitationally, and by the very act of watering it erodes away. And when the soil watering-well erodes away the dry soil has less time for the water to saturate down before the water becomes wasteful runoff. And often, taking with it, gardening chemicals such as fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides.
Mulch mounds are not much better at solving the issue in fact, they can exacerbate the problem of garden chemical products like pesticides and herbicide runoff. Mulches are breeding grounds for pests like earwigs and pillbugs to name a few, which encourages greater use of pesticides, which then accumulates in the mulches; and mulches tend to float and flow with water runoff from over watering and large downpours of rain. These so-called solution failures are typical of the other solutions as well as those not mentioned. The worst consequence of these runoffs are the gardening chemicals used to help grow and protect our garden plants often end up flowing into street gutters, streams, ponds and other environmentally sensitive areas. Although there are various methods of trying to prevent water and chemical runoff, all, or almost all suffer from one, or more than one disadvantage.
Therefore, there is a need to provide methods and apparatus for improved, and more secure methods, for the controlling of wasteful water runoff and the containment of useful gardening products to limit them from becoming a detriment, and danger, to their surrounding environments.
As long as there are plants and water, there will be gardening, and gardening is here stay, and it can be accomplished more effectively and environmentally friendly.